AllenN's blog

(This is part three on the differences between capitalism and socialism...)

Good intentions and $4.65 will get you a mocha latte at Starbucks.

Good intentions are used to justify socialism's control of people in a society. And I believe that most people who promote socialism are not evil, they are just not very bright and somewhat confused. They believe that having good intentions gives them the power to make decisions for other adults.

They get that impression because already we allow government to make many decisions for us and most people just go along.

Amy Krishnamurthy, the newly elected Chair of the Acton-Boxborough Regional School Committee (SC), has flatly refused to speak to Acton Forum editor Allen Nitschelm, after repeated attempts to contact the Chair and ask some simple questions about the resignation of Superintendent of Schools Glenn Brand, effective June 30, 2017.

A very strange story has appeared in my favorite Wall Street Journal, about a Yale administrator who was posting racially insensitive comments in her Yelp reviews. Jane Chu referred to some people as "white trash" and said that a particular Japanese restaurant might be good enough for white people, implying that they were not as sophisticated about Asian cuisine as she was, coming from a Chinese background.

The latest news is that Yale has put her on "leave" after more "insensitive" posts were discovered.

In part one, I talked about the greatness of capitalism, and tried to show sort of a mathematical way of proving it. Capitalism likely improves the outcome of economic trades made by people versus trades authorized by, or restricted by, or controlled by, the government. A little improvement here and there, over millions of transactions a day, over millions of people, over thousands of days, yields a huge dividend to society. It sort of reminds me of the difference between getting 5% interest or 10% interest.

It is hard to write about the greatness of capitalism because it seems so obvious, like explaining why one plus one equals two. But there are so many people now who seem to embrace some form of socialism that it does seem necessary to remind them of why capitalism is a much better economic and social system. "Socialism," despite its label, is much worse for society.

Let me start by discussing a principle in Economics 101, which is that people act rationally and do what is best for themselves.

Former President Barack Obama has won the Kennedy Center's 2017 Profile in Courage Award for a speech he is to give to Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street brokerage house. Obama will be paid $400,000 for the speech, which is expected to take him about forty minutes. That works out to about $10,000 per minute or $600,000 an hour, which means Obama will earn over 10,000 times more per hour than the average American worker.

There has been a lot of discussion about "fake news," with much it it fueled by the rise of the Internet. It used to be that getting your story in the newspaper faced a certain high barrier. Your item had to be newsworthy, of course, but it was also subject to review and confirmation by the reporter or editor. Publication conveyed a certain amount of legitimacy. If a mistake was made, a correction would be run.

But something strange started to happen several years ago, and maybe it was started by our love and fascination with celebrities.

I wanted to thank Richard (Anping) Liu for his articles on the Sanctuary City/Sanctuary Town issue, as well as the other contributors we have had over the last couple of months on this topic. Richard's most recent article examines crime rates for Sanctuary Cities and Towns versus state averages.

There are probably a few big reasons and a million little reasons why Donald Trump won the Presidency, not the least of which was the flawed persona of his main opponent. But history will show that Chief Justice Roberts was a primary cause.

Roberts' correct decision not to intervene in overturning Obamacare led to Trump's victory as it galvanized opponents of President Obama and his policies, and Mrs. Clinton ran more on Obama's legacy than on her husband's. Embracing Obama allowed the many failures of Obama's presidency to be assigned to candidate Clinton.

At last night's Annual Town Meeting (TM), my friend Charlie Kadlec proposed an amendment to the town funding warrant article to transfer $1 million from our reserves to lower next year's tax rate, which would have saved the average taxpayer around $125. The average single-family property tax bill would still have increased to $10,988, a 2.77% increase, but would have stayed under $11,000. His amendment was defeated by about 160-110.

I'm up in Canada for a trip this week, and read the regional "Globe and Mail" newspaper, which reported on a recent attempt by the Canadian government to agree to a criminal extradition treaty with China.

The concept of free trade is great. We should assume every bilateral relationship with other countries would be based on the ideal of free trade. Free trade provides an economic benefit to our citizens, in that it brings cheaper, or better-quality, goods to our citizens than we otherwise would have had. And in general, competition improves the products made by domestic manufacturers.

Take the American car industry for example. Without competition, American manufacturers had a virtual monopoly and were able to make cars with planned obsolescence.

Today's WSJ had a story about some older guy, holding a cute dog in his lap, who was going to be "paying more" if the Republican plan to replace Obamacare came to pass. Nobody likes to hear about someone "paying more" so I read the article. Turns out he was a vet who ran a small office and who offered health insurance to his staff. But his costs would rise because he had an older workforce whose premiums would increase under the new Republican healthcare plan. What a shame, what an injustice!

The mainstream media continues to act like the tail is wagging the dog with regards to Donald Trump. He apparently spends a couple minutes on a "tweet" and the media spends several weeks dissecting it, discussing it, and commenting on it. What a master manipulator this guy is.

Emotions are funny things. Our lives are governed by doing things that make us feel good, and trying to avoid things that make us feel bad.

I guess pain is also like an emotion. The body produces physical pain in order to teach you how to protect yourself. If you touch the hot stove and it really hurts, you won't likely do that again. But if you were able to sever the nerve connections between your finger and your arm, so that the pain message never got to your brain, you could hold your finger to the stove until it was well done.

In 2015, during the presidential campaign, Trump made many statements about illegal immigrants causing crime. After a pretty lengthy discussion, the Washington Post fact checker (Mchelle Ye Hee Lee) gave Trump's statement "four pinocchios" for being false. This is defined as a "whopper" and the worst rating for falsehood. This is a clear-cut example of "fake news" generated by the mainstream media.

After posting my fake news article this morning, I was remarking to a friend how much snow we've gotten and how California has turned from drought to plenty with regards to water. I made the statement that California's drought must be over, based on overflowing dams and reservoirs, with more rain on the way.

The original School Committee's budget (discussed at last night's meeting, which I did not attend) proposes that Acton's assessment increase by 4.3%, while Boxborough's increase is proposed at 1.15%. That means Acton's assessment will be increasing at almost four times the rate of Boxborough's, and twice the rate of inflation (which was around 2% in 2016).

My wife still likes to get the Globe, but I only read it for laughs these days. We continue to receive the print version but I called today to cancel it. Now that winter is almost over, I don't need all that extra newsprint around for starting fires.

I attended the "surprise" BOS meeting which had the issue of Acton becoming a "sanctuary town" on the agenda, although if you had just read the agenda, you would have had no idea this was the actual topic for discussion. The issue was instead framed about making Acton a "safe community." Yeah, right. Safer for law-breakers, maybe, but not necessarily safer for law-abiders.

These Orwellian descriptions (used by both political parties) are getting quite annoying. We don't want to "offend" people so we come up with calling black, white and up, down.

Some members of the Acton Board of Selectmen are going to attempt to make Acton a "sanctuary community." This is a terrible idea on so many levels and if you are opposed to defying federal law and encouraging illegal activity, you should attend the Board of Selectmen meeting this Monday and prepare to speak out against this outrage.

You can read some of the background materials on the town website here: http://doc.acton-ma.gov/dsweb/Get/Document-58011/040%20(3)%20%20Safe%20Communities%20Information.pdf.

I used to be a "moderate Republican." That was before the presidency of Barack Obama, who showed me that moderation and bipartisanship has no place in American politics, not for the foreseeable future, anyway.

Democrats and the media (sorry for the redundancy) like to say that Obama's decision to "use his pen and his phone" to unilaterally implement his agenda, illegally, and against the bipartisan history of the Senate, was OK because Republicans wouldn't compromise.